On Happiness

 

On Happiness: some random thoughts

"Perfect happiness is the absence of happiness."      Chuang Tzu

"Destroy a man's illusions and you destroy his happiness."

                                                                         Hubert van Zeller

"The path to happiness lies through the remembering of death."                                                                                  Abdal Hakim Murad

Gautama Siddhartha Buddha, sometimes called the "antinomian" Hindu sage prince of the Shakya clan, had many argumentative and even pesky disciples who never tired of picking Buddha's brain on everything under the sun. The grand sage and prophet of Buddhism answered many, but about some he always remained silent, or hesitant. For example, on the very important issue of the nature of God, Buddha is said to have remained silent or to have discoursed elliptically or symbolically.

In the modern world, particularly in the modern West, where traditional Christianity lost its pull and foot hold in post-Renaissance Europe (although some like the great Mahatma Gandhi have said that "Christianity was a good religion before it went to Europe") many disoriented and discontented people often feel attracted to some aspect, interpretation or sect of this great world religion, especially to Zen Buddhism. Although there are many reasons for that, one that often stands out is that some Western orientalists--- polemists who are usually metaphysically illiterate and who are often the same ones who question and doubt the authenticity of Sufism/Islamic esoterism and think of it as nothing but a bad copy or crude plagiarism of Hindu spirituality or of some other preceding religion--- these ideologues find Buddhism attractive because they think that it is more an "atheistic" social philosophy than a proper, authentically revealed religion like other world religions such as Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. Now, this is of course nonsense since Buddhism is an authentic religion but one which is different in its discourse and in its use of conceptual and spiritual categories, and especially different from the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions. Some Muslims, most recently Hamza Yusuf (2013), have actually written that the Buddha is one of the 124,000 prophets mentioned in the Holy Quran, the prophet named Dhu al-Kifl (a contraction of "Kapila/Kapilavastu", the birthplace of Buddha). To state this point metaphysically, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr and other scholars and sages have done, "God has spoken many times to different peoples and in different tongues..."


But I have digressed from the topic. Inshallah (God willing), some other day I will post on these crucial issues in a more detailed manner. For now, it suffices to say that Buddhism is not "atheistic" as it is presented to be by some people, but it is non-theistic. And there is a world of difference between those two words---atheistic and non-theistic. Or, it is not "God-centric", God as understood in other major religions. What is God in these religions is sometimes called Supreme Reality, or Supreme Consciousness in Buddhism. The Buddhist worldview with its main idea of "dukkha" emphasizes an approach that is geared towards "knowing the very nature of things" ---things as they really are----and is, therefore, not given to defining everything conceptually and conventionally, because every definition is ultimately "a form". And with forms---important and unavoidable as they are--- as every informed Muslim and Jew in particular should know, there is always the possibility, or danger, of "shirk" or "idol worship", of confusing the symbol (ayat) with Reality, of confusing the finger that points to the moon with the moon itself: danger of polytheism. Because the Buddha was often silent or not clear on this issue of the nature of God (as clarity is ordinarily understood), and because Buddhism is an apophatic theology or worldview (negative theology or the metaphysics of tanzih/utter transcendence), does not mean that Buddhism is just another variety of atheism and the Buddha merely an older, browner version or incarnation of Voltaire, Marx or Jean Paul-Sartre!

So, one of the Buddha's rather pesky disciples often asked Buddha this question: "O Great Sage of the Shakya: What is happiness, and, more importantly, what is the way to happiness?" After trying to answer this disciple in ways that he was known for, The Enlightened One finally said this to that disciple: " There is no way to happiness; happiness IS the way."

                                    

Chris Jami in his excellent book Killosophy says, "The most fragile, unhappy people destine themselves to live lives of constantly reminding themselves to be happy." The truly happy people are those who don't run after happiness, who don't obsess about it and who have never consciously tried to define it since defining something always means limiting it, reducing it. Defining means giving some form to something. We can, and we often do that, but sooner or later we realize our folly, or at least the wise among us do. Like that other abstraction we call "love", any attempt at defining happiness will always remain partial, even futile. The moment the fish starts thinking about or starts analyzing the water in which it exists, was born into and will die therein, its miseries begin. In a sense, this obsession to "know it all" is a very modern attitude geared towards control and prediction. It is a mindset which tries to demarcate, to define, to categorize or build cages around things since reductionist modernity is nothing if it is not about control. The kind of control that essentially leads to domination and violence, hence unhappiness or wretchedness. The consequences of this obsession with control and domination can be clearly seen in the form of the ecological crisis that stares us in the face.

A truly contented (happy) person is one whose heart is not dead. Life takes every one of us on a unique journey, but what is shared by all those who are on this journey is the mixed experience of both happiness and misery. Since man, according to all pre-modern and traditional perspectives has a hierarchy of realities within him, these experiences are also felt at different levels within man. There is the reality of the Spirit (ar-Ruh), that of the psyche (nafs) and then that of the body (jism) at the lower end of the hierarchy. We experience happiness and sorrow at all these levels. The body and the psyche are in the realm of flux or transience and only the Spirit is the changeless, the uncreated in man. The happiness of the jism and nafs, while real on their own levels, are ephemeral or transitory, here one day and gone the next. According to Islamic philosophers from Farabi, Ghazzali, Suharwardi and all the way to Ibn al Arabi and Mullah Sadra, all have stressed the hierarchy or the gradation of being (wujud) and because of this the different levels of happiness experienced at each level of these realities, from sensual to intellectual and spiritual. And because of this, Islam shares with Buddhism and Hinduism the saying "die before you die" (or "die to the self so that you live in the Self", the fana and baqa). This 'dying before dying' resulting in the attainment of permanent happiness that is not fleeting and not the cause of pain and suffering requires detachment from the world, requires us to die to the world while we are still alive. Or, "to be IN the world but not OF the world" as the famous Sufi saying informs us. The more detached from the world we are, the more we die to the world, the more intense our self consciousness becomes and the more acutely we become aware of true reality of things and that true knowledge of "things as they are" is what gives us lasting happiness.

As in Buddhism, so in Islam, the attachment to transient happiness is actually blamed or held responsible for man's dukkha or suffering in this world. But whereas in the former this is over-emphasized and which is understandable because, as I already mentioned, Buddhism is an apophatic weltanschauung (worldview), or it has a negative theology, such is not the case in Islam where happiness in this world is also valid, its attainment actually encouraged but clearly differentiated from the happiness that man can experience at other, higher levels of being (works such as the "Tehsil e Sa'ada" by Al Farabi and other words by such sages like Al Ghazzali and many Sufis, including those by Sheikh al Akbar Ibn al Arabi all say so ). Worldly happiness must be attained, but real happiness is one which has permanence and does not come to an end with the demise of man's body and psyche at death. For example, it is reflected in the smile of the dying man who attained it while he was still alive. Since the heart is the seat of the Spirit, that smile confirms that the dying person's heart remains alive while they depart from this world. Al- Ghazali has identified this highest form of happiness, this permanent happiness with "knowledge of God".

The Sufis, especially Ibn al Arabi, say, "the truly happy person is one with whom God is pleased". This is the highest form of happiness---spiritual happiness--- where a person, a wayfarer is contented, or who is experiencing "ridhwan" because his Lord is "raadhi" with him. The Muslim belief is that no matter what we have achieved, what positions we have attained and what we have gathered and possessed in worldly terms, we cannot really be happy if Allah is not pleased with us. True happiness will always elude us, will always be out of reach for those of us who forget this. And that is why, one of the best prayers we can gift the pious amongst us with is to say that "may God be pleased with him or her". A famous hadith says, "God loveth those who are content" and, conversely, only those who have the love, fear and knowledge of God are truly content. The Sufi master Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari has said: "Often in giving you something He is (in reality) denying you (something), just as He may, in denying you something, be really bestowing a gift upon you." God's loved ones are always aware of this apparently paradoxical hikma and are, therefore, content either way. We are again reminded that this is also because of the knowledge of God by yet another Sufi master, Sheikh Ahmed al Alawi: "He who knows God is disinterested in the gifts of God and he who is negligent of God is insatiable for the gifts of God."

The philosopher sage Seyyed Hossein Nasr tells us that, "a person who is content and with whom God is content, has no fear, fears nothing in this world". People who have been blessed with this (essentially spiritual) contentment transcend fear because "they are God's friends". Nasr further says that faith or iman is a gift of joy from God to us, and that faith and happiness are inseparable. Faith requires "sacrifice and self discipline but results in joy and happiness for the person of faith, who knows that in performing these rites one is doing God’s Will...and thereby experiencing the grace or barakah that issues from the performance of the sacred rites" and that "On the human plane love is often combined with pain and sorrow, but the love of God is inseparable from joy and happiness, even when there is longing and separation." God is the source of all goodness and beauty that is around us and within us, "how can a soul that attains through the love of God, through the attachment to the source of all beauty not be in a state of joy and happiness?" he asks. This happiness that comes through faith is the antidote to all the fears, the doubts and the trepidations we experience in this world, if only man has sincere faith, has tawwakul, he tells us. He continues: "The Islamic saying tawakkaltu ‘alā’Llāh (“I place my confidence in God”), repeated so often in daily life, encourages one to take refuge in the bosom of the Divine in a state of contentment, a state that overcomes and transcends all that causes sorrow and unhappiness in human life in this world." (2014, p. 81)

Man is born with a spiritual yearning that remains with him while he still breathes. It is so because his very substance, his very essence, has kneaded into it the perfume of the Truth, Goodness and Beauty of his Creator. He is, after all, imago Dei (image/form of his Creator). A yearning for return to that origin which is also our end. While we experience the transient happiness of our psyche and body, attaining this permanent happiness that is not followed by sorrow and suffering remains a challenge: "The difficulty lies in attaining permanent happiness in a world that some have characterized as a vale of tears. In Islam, as in other authentic religions, that permanent state of happiness is attained by gaining not the freedom of the passionate self to receive whatever it desires, but freedom from desire and from the passionate self." (Nasr 2014)

Let me end this post which is for the most part an explication of, or commentary on, Seyyed Hossein Nasr's 2014 lecture on the "Islamic Perspective on Happiness" given at Emory University, USA, with his beautiful concluding insights. Says he,

"To attain permanent happiness, we must therefore remember who we really are, where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going. We must detach ourselves from fleeting pleasures and joys and seek permanent joy by attaching ourselves to the spiritual world, which is our original home and the only place where we shall attain permanent happiness. We must die before we die; die to the world here and now in order to gain eternal felicity in the life of the spirit and the intellect understood in its traditional sense....Only through leading a spiritual life do we gain that peace that “passeth all understanding” and attain that abiding happiness for which we were brought into this world and which is our birthright by virtue of our primordial nature ( fitṛah), yet which we have forgotten and have to recall. To be truly happy, we must rediscover who we really are. In this process of rediscovery, even sadness can be a major step towards the attainment of happiness, if this sadness is nostalgia for our original abode in its proximity to the Divine." (Nasr 2014, p. 90)

The World on Fire

 
The World on Fire

“To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”    Confucius

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."    Reinhold Niebuhr

“One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words.”   Goethe

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There is an old saying of the sages and saints that “too much bitterness leads to hell.”

There is a lot in this world that can and do frustrate us, irritate us and make us angry. Every day, we experience and come face to face with acts and events, with people and groups of people that enrage us without fail. To be angry most, if not all, of the time is actually the condition of the average person in these latter days of modernity. And to be angry in the virtual world is as if it is a requirement nowadays, a default setting of being present on the social media platforms: “I am angry, therefore I exist” to twist the dominant Cartesian logic of the times. In the hellish dungeons of the social media in particular everything and everyone gets blocked, canceled, enraged and, therefore, weaponized so easily these days. Aggression is now available and experienced in every form and template: gender-sexual, ethno-racial, ontic-epistemic, work-related, age-related and at both macro and micro levels of existence. Rage is all around us, in abundant supply.

Anger is of course a legitimate human emotion and it cannot be denied. There is even sacred rage, anger that is completely justified, just as there is the concept of a “just war” in many world religions or civilizations inspired by these world religions. But in an increasingly and thoroughly secular and God-less world when anger turns into bitterness, then the harm that is done to the agent of rage far exceeds that done to the object of rage: bitterness destroys the angry person more effectively than the object or target of rage. That madman of Europe, the “illuminated psychopath” Friedrich Nietzsche, once rightly said that, “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” The abysses of our times, many as they are and everywhere as they are, not only gaze back into you but actually and quickly pull you in, if you are not on guard.

And what should one do to be on one’s guard in these dark times? Well, here’s another piece of wisdom from the past, and this one is from a Taoist (Chinese) sage which says that, “When the world is on fire, the sage tends to his garden.” This should not be seen as apathy, or as indifference towards the world and its problems, but understood as it has always been understood throughout history and across civilizations: as the profound wisdom that engagement with the world, especially by those of us who have not engaged, or who have failed to engage fully and sincerely with our own inner selves, with our own inner moral, intellectual and spiritual universes, does not always lead to the betterment of the world around us and often does more damage to both the worlds within and without. “Before we embark on the mission to rid the world of thorns and nails which are scattered all over the place, we need to put on our shoes” as an old African proverb informs us.

But in fact, on a much higher (or deeper) level, metaphysically speaking that is, the wisdom can be understood in the sense of our relationship with God and with His creation: vertically and horizontally. I have written about this earlier in another post. Whereas vertically we are required to be passive, we are now active; whereas horizontally we are required to be active, we are now passive. This may seem odd to the average reader, but it is exactly in our passivity viz-z-viz God that we can avoid our anger from turning into bitterness which can lead us straight into hell. And also, it is this vertical passivity which, because it informs and guides whatever activity we carry out in the world, makes our horizontal existence effective and meaningful, both for us and for everything and everyone around us. Think of the vertical providing the context, the needed proportion or balance (meezan) for the horizontal without which an activity (or activism in general) can quickly turn destructive.

                                 

We must, therefore, take heed and remember that quietude/quietism and careful and thoughtful disengagement with what goes on around us in the world where everything is now politicized and vulgarized (meaning disengagement in the true Taoist sense of Wu Wei, or “non-action” or “effortless action”) is sometimes more important than being active or actively engaged with the world. This detachment which is the result of compassion and acceptance of the inexplicable "Mystery" in the higher, transcendent scheme of things must not be confused with the modern indifference or unconcern about which Tennessee Williams once said that "Happiness is insensitivity". While the original Greek apatheia meant detachment from ego, or the lack or absence of base passions ( and therefore, attachment to virtues), the modern "apathy" means the exact opposite: enslavement to ego and detachment from, or forgetfulness of, what is above the ego. 

Once again, to quote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton: "Let us not forget the redemptive power of the hermit, the monk, the recluse, the bodhisattva, the nun, the sannyasi who out of pity for the universe, out of loyalty to mankind, and without a spirit of bitterness or resentment, withdraw into the healing silence of the wilderness, or of poverty, or of obscurity, not in order to preach to others but to heal in themselves the wounds of the whole world." The great metaphysician Isa Nur al Din (Frithjof Schuon) has similarly said, ‘The world need hermits as much as preachers. In Islam, it is said that the equilibrium of the world depends largely on the existence—sometimes hidden—of the saints, or also on the Invocation of God’s Name. If man is not holy, nonetheless, the Name is holy, and man is made holy by the invocation.’ (F. Schuon, in a letter to a Hans Kury, 1951).

Never underestimate this redemptive power of silence and disengagement.

Short, Short: A Sufi tale

 The Tale of the Sands: A Sufi Tale



One of the teaching devices for which the Sufis are famous is the Sufi tale. This one, “The Tale of the Sands,” relates to their doctrine of fana, the transcending, in God, of the finite self. 

A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the sands of the desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared.

It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming from the desert itself, whispered: “The Wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream.”

The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand, and only getting absorbed: that the wind could fly, and this was why it could cross a desert.

“By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across.
You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow the wind to carry you over, to your destination.”

“But how could this happen?”

“By allowing yourself to be absorbed in the wind.”

This idea was not acceptable to the stream. After all, it had never been absorbed before. It did not want to lose its individuality.

And, once having lost it, how was one to know that it could ever be regained?

“The wind,” said the sand, “performs this function. It takes up water, carries it over the desert, and then lets it fall again. Falling as rain, the water again becomes a river.”

“How can I know that this is true?” “It is so, and if you do not believe it, you cannot become more than a quagmire, and even that could take many, many years. And it certainly is not the same as a stream.”

“But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?”

“You cannot in either case remain so,” the whisper said. “Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are even today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one.”

When it heard this, certain echoes began to arise in the thoughts of the stream. Dimly, it remembered a state in which it—or some part of it?—had been held in the arms of a wind. It also remembered—or did it?—that this was the real thing, not necessarily the obvious thing, to do. And the stream raised its vapor into the welcoming arms of the wind, which gently and easily bore it upwards and along, letting it fall softly as soon as they reached the roof of a mountain, many, many, miles away. And because it had its doubts, the stream was able to remember and record more strongly in its mind the details of the experience. It reflected, “Yes, now I have learned my true identity.”

The stream was learning. But the sands whispered: “We know, because we see it happen day after day: and because we, the sands, extend from the riverside all the way to the mountain.”

And that is why it is said that the way in which the stream of Life is to continue on its journey is written in the Sands.

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Source: Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, Harper Collins: HarperCollins, 1991.

Original source: Idries Shah, Tales of the Dervishes (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), pp: 23–24.

Short, short: Parables

For ages wise men, sages, rishis, prophets, men embedded in the Sacred, men of God have used Parables to make their point. A parable is 'a usually short...story that illustrates a moral attitude or a religious principle' (Merriam-Webster's).

Parables are a good way to shed light on issues that are difficult to grasp, especially by those with a lesser type of philosophical spirit but maybe possessing another faculty that comprehends the same truth when told in the form of a tale, a story. Children come to mind.
"A parable is a brief story that is true to life, comparing the point of commonality between two unlike things, given for the purpose of teaching spiritual truth."

A parable is a story in prose or verse that is told to illustrate a religious, moral or philosophical idea. A parable is like a metaphor that has been extended to form a brief, coherent fiction. Unlike a simile, its parallel meaning is unspoken, implicit, but not ordinarily secret, though "to speak in parables" has come to suggest obscurity.

Parables are the simplest of narratives: they sketch a setting, describe an action and its result; they often involve a character facing a particular moral dilemma, or making a questionable decision and then suffering the consequences of that choice. Aside from providing guidance and suggestions for proper action in life, parables offer a metaphorical language which allows people to discuss difficult or complex ideas more easily. (Wikipedia)

Ignorance and forgetfulness/heedlessness (ghaflah/nissyan) have many aspects and layers and they are sometimes identified and addressed using different approaches, some clearly understandable and some not easily graspable.

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There is a proverb that 'the "opposition" of the man of knowledge is better than the "support" of the fool.'

The Sufi master Salim Abdali bear witness that this is true in the greater ranges of existence, as it is true in the lower levels.

A horseman from his point of vantage saw a poisonous snake slip down the throat of a sleeping man. The horseman realized that if the man were allowed to sleep the venom would surely kill him.

Accordingly, he lashed the sleeper until he was awake. Having no time to lose, he forced this man to a place where there were a number of rotten apples lying upon the ground and made him eat them. Then he made him drink large gulps of water from a stream.

All the while the other man was trying to get away, screaming, crying, cursing: 'What have I done, you enemy of humanity, that you should abuse me in this manner?'

Finally, when he was near to exhaustion, and dusk was falling, the man fell to the ground and vomitted out the apples, the water, and a snake. When he saw what had come out of him, he realized what had happened, and begged the forgiveness of the horseman.

This is our condition. In reading this, do not take history for allegory and allegory for history. Those who are endowed with knowledge have responsibility. Those who are not, have none beyond what they can conjecture.

The man who was saved said: 'If you had told me, I would have accepted your treatment with a good grace.'

The horseman answered: 'If I had told you, you would not have believed. Or you would have been paralysed by fright. Or run away. Or gone to sleep again, seeking forgetfulness. And there would not have been time.'

Spurring his horse, the mysterious rider rode away.

The dervaish master Haider Gul says: 'There is a limit beyond which it is unhealthy for mankind to conceal truth in order not to offend those whose minds are closed.'

(Source: from Idries Shah, 1969, 'Tales of the Dervishes', E.P Dutton and Co: NY.)

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Says Shakespeare in Hamlet:

I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. So, again, good night.
I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.
One word more, good lady. (3.4.174-181)

In a day's time

 In a day's time
(inspired by a similar poem of Pablo Neruda called "What happens in a day")

The world changes in a day's time.

In mere twenty-four hours
People give and receive flowers
The world is turned upside down
The smile, the laugh turns into a frown
A child is born, as another dies
A war starts and decimates many lives
Some laugh out loud, some suffer and cry
In the midst of a calamity
Some give up, others struggle and try.

The world changes in a day's time.

In a span of few hours
Some gain, some lose power
Old lovers part ways
She leaves, he stays
Friends become enemies, enemies friends
Passions grow cold, loyalties descend
All crack and crumble, nothing to share
No love, no warmth and no such thing as care
Feelings, trust, hope and all the beliefs
Fall and fade away like dead autumn leaves.

The world changes in a day's time.

In a day, our dreams come true
Our fears realized, and doubts renewed
Bringing mirth and joy for you and for me
Horror and grief, that's also for you and for me
Yesterday, it was all bright and sunny
But today, it's all grey and gloomy
Oh, the terrible power, the unsettling content
Of an uncertain, unpredictable moment!

So many things change in a day's time.

The old man in his ancient rocking chair
Tracing all with his tired, sunken eyes
Sits in his porch, the sun in his shriveled hair
As if defying time
He sits and he sits, looking firm, looking wise
Then one day, he's gone, no longer there
And you hear the news of his sudden demise.

On a sad November day
Lost in thoughts all the way
You walk home from work
As you turn the familiar corner
In a dull, almost mechanical manner
A sudden void, a colorless emptiness
Hits your eyes, shattering the sameness
Trying to make sense, you freeze and you heave
Gone is the giant tree, the treasure of the town
The storehouse of memories, the king with a crown
Gone! Gone with all its gamboge autumn leaves

The world changes in a day's time.

Life, Oh, life!
It has its own crazy, tragicomic ways
Disrupting plans, condemning and redeeming
Affirming and denying, all the games that it plays
What's it all about you wonder, what's the meaning
Of all the paradoxes, the contradictions
That happen in such a short time, in a day's time
You wonder, but its neither truth nor fiction
Oh, how the world changes in such a short time---in a day's time.

For more, click: The Revolution, The Force of Habit

Short, short: The mighty indomitable force of habit

St. Simeon Stylites (ca. 390-459)

The mighty indomitable force of habit

 “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.”  Aristotle

habit, (n). An established custom. A thing that you do often and almost without thinking, especially something that is hard to stop doing.

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St. Simeon Stylites (ca.390-459), the first of the stylites (or pillar ascetics), was born on the Syrian border of Cilicia. After spending many years in practicing severe mortifications first as a monk at a monastery and then as a hermit on the Mount Teleanissae near Antioch, where the fame of his sanctity began to attract huge crowds, he erected and mounted a pillar to escape them and remained until his death in the greatest austerity on the top of it, which was gradually increased up to a height of sixty feet. Greatly venerated as a holy man, he by preaching and personal intercourse exercised considerable influence upon the world of his time, converted many, and was listened to and consulted by all, from emperors and prelates to commoners, not only from the Middle and Near East but even from far countries in France and Spain.

The Indian traditionalist writer A.K. Saran in one his books (Takamori Lectures: The Crisis of Mankind) mentions him and his piety and then proceeds to add his own commentary in the form of an "episodic fiction" as follows:

Once when a country west far from Antioch was facing a terrible famine, the priest there prayed and got an oracular message to the effect that if St. Simeon comes down from his pillar to their city, it will end the famine. A number of high ranking emissaries were sent to the Saint by the king to persuade him to condescend to come down to the city for saving the country. He, however, went on refusing and remained adamant to their entreaties. The king then was advised to look for and engage the most charming lady in and around the country and ask her to lure the Saint to the city.

The lady with this grave mission approached the Saint and did everything to captivate him. The Saint, having endured this severest trial to the extreme point, at last gave way to the temptation and admitted that he got fascinated by her beauty and fell in love with her. When the lady, exalted and overjoyed at her success, accordingly, requested him to leave the pillar and go away with her, the Saint, however, ruled it out. And on this last point alone she could never induce him to accept. The beautiful charmer returned to the country crestfallen to report to the king the unexpected failure of the mission.

All this time, the Devil was active behind in bringing about the Saint's fall. Just when the Devil triumphantly thought the Saint had fallen, to his utter surprise the "No" of the Saint resounded in his ears. The Devil thus finally himself appeared before the Saint to confess his devilish designs and apologize---the Saint forgave him. The Devil then begged the Saint to answer one question as his last favor: how did he avert the seemingly inevitable fall at the last moment?

"By the mighty indomitable force of habit", came the reply.

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habit, (n.).

h-a-b-i-t. Remove the "h" and you still have "a bit". Remove the "h" and "a" and you are left with "bit" of it. Remove the "h", "a", and "b" and you still have "it".

Man is a creature of habit, but which can take him on either of the paths: one leading to heaven, and the other straight to hell. The choice is always ours.

Short, Short: Relationships

"The world scatters us, and the ego compresses us; God gathers us together and dilates us; He appeases us and delivers us."     

                                                                                    Frithjof Schuon

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Relationships: The great mystic Meister Eckhardt once said, “They speak of God as if He were a cow!”

The way human relationships have changed is nothing but a reflection of the way we relate to our Creator nowadays. In other words, our horizontal relationships in the created world are always dependent on our vertical relationship with God. Man, Pontifical man, stands at the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical axes of existence. He has a hierarchy within and without, in the microcosm and the macrocosm, respectively. Vertically, man has states of being, each lower state less real than the one above. Each higher state on this inner chain or “ladder” contains all that is in the lower level(s). Each lower level is the effect, and the higher one the cause of this effect. To climb up this great chain, this vertical ladder, (that is the very purpose of the gift of life, after all) traditional man always employed the science of symbols in which he was well versed. This is because all manifestations, both within and without, are in the form of symbols (ayat). But since the profaned (modern) man, the Promethean man, cannot decipher symbols, he remains blind and oblivious to the levels of being (even when he does not violently, naively and ultimately irrationally, rejects all hierarchy). Then there is the horizontal plane, or the “modes” of being. This is the plane on which we relate to the world, to creation, to all manifestations of the Principle. This is the plane of quality, of all we think and do, a plane where everything is equally “real” but only to the extent that the level is real on the vertical axis. This quality, therefore, is totally dependent on our state of being defined by its vertical level. These are just some hints on which the intelligent reader is invited to reflect and by doing so, he/she will be able to see, one hopes, where we stand now in these latter days of the corrupting cycle of time.

In short, because of these axes at the intersection of which he stands, traditional man is both king and slave, both lord and servant, or both Khalifa 'Allah and Abd 'Allah. He has been given the vicegerency of this world but is also required to be in total submission to his Creator. And it is this that is missing in the totally uprooted and profaned modern man who wants to be king but not slave and the most visible outcome of that arrogance---that sheer stupidity--- can be seen, among other manifestations, in the ecological crisis, a total collapse of life as such, that is now not a question of if but when.

Charles le Gai Eaton wrote in his last work before departing from this world: "Islam is pre-eminently the religion of relationship. When the Qur'an denounces 'breaking ties of relationship' as a sin likely to lead us to damnation it indicates quite clearly that establishing and maintaining such ties is a primary duty for God's 'viceroy on earth (khalifa). Here we we are---you and me and the rest of us---little units, pebbles on the beach. It is by our relationship with other people, with the animals and with the natural world, all of which, ultimately, point back towards the Creator of heavens and the earth." (Reflections, 2012, p.118) 

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 Duniya/The world: This duniya is like a silken shroud in which we are all wrapped. It is soft, comfortable to our body (nafs). All love it, but it is especially adored by the spiritually dormant. (from Schuon’s “Primordial meditations”).

Reason/Intellect: Reason is like the minor stars, or like the moon, that shine at night. Intellect is like the sun. Reason is like a lamp that we need as long as we are in the dark of the night, to help us, to guide us, to show us the way. With the rise of the sun, which is the intellect, the stars and the moon fade away and lose their efficacy in the brightness of day. The lamp becomes useless. Only a fool would insist on using it while the sun shines brightly overhead.  

Existence of God:  To deny God is to see the wave and deny the existence of the ocean; to deny God is to see a speck of dust and deny space. To insist on asking for the “proofs” of the existence of God is to be like that little fish that asks its mother for the proof of the existence of water.

 

For more, click: The Post-real world as hell

What is Quettawali? (Part 4: Conclusion)

 What is Quettawali? Part 4: Conclusion

(Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3 )

“A man of understanding has lost nothing if he has himself….The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”

                                                                          Michel de Montaigne

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest achievement.” 

                                                                           Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There is more required nowadays to make a single wise man than formerly to make seven sages, and more is needed nowadays to deal with a single person than required with a whole people in former times.” 

                                                                                   Gracian Baltasar
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Modernity, whenever and wherever it arrives, it does so at enormous costs. It is a world shattering, or rather, a worldview-shattering phenomenon. Like a powerful earthquake, it jolts everything: it disrupts the old, disturbs continuities, fragments totalities and dilutes authenticities; it profanes the sacred everywhere, especially within the experiencing and knowing subject, to speak philosophically. Modernity, after all, is by default both a state of mind and a state of being that elevates the worldly and the secular and declares triumphantly “God is dead!” in its Nietzschean manifestation, and “If there is no God, I am god and everything is permissible!” in its Dostoyevskian interpretation. That is why the modern worldview is defined, above all, by an absence of the sense of the sacred. The non-modern or traditional universe, on the contrary, is infused with the sacred, with the symbolic. It is qualitative in nature, since symbols always connect what is lower and mundane (matter, quantity) to the higher, the spiritual and the transcendental, connecting the contingent visible to the Eternal Invisible.

Modernity, because it is so thoroughly worldly and because it has the utmost disregard for the sacred, eventually turns whatever is symbolic into the diabolic (the opposite of symbolic being diabolic). It inverts values and reprioritizes the elements of a culture’s value system. It attacks the foundational structures of a traditional, non-modern society, not so much to completely destroy it but to retool, re-evaluate and re-prioritize its organizing principles. It succeeds by turning the essentials of a traditional society into accidentals and, conversely, its accidentals into essentials. Modernity succeeds not so much by destroying, but by making irrelevant. While rejection still retains the power of, or at least the potential for, revival and alternative uses---if only because in some ways it is still relevant and equal, is a virile rival, even if temporarily sidelined----irrelevancy is not only uselessness, but also nonsense and meaninglessness; it is impotency. A scholar of perennial wisdom or hikma which is a form of knowledge and being that is the hallmark of all authentic religious traditions has even gone so far as to say that “Modernity is essentially evil, but only accidentally good; Tradition is essentially good, but only accidentally evil.” (Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Knowledge and the Sacred).

In the previous three parts on Quettawali (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), I talked about identity and community. In this final part of the series I will look at some more related issues, especially the profound changes that have taken place in Quetta over the past few decades and conclude with some speculations about the future of the place and its code of life, Quettawali.

Sociologists have long argued that a most visible sign of ever-expanding modern metropolitan spaces is the phenomenon of uprooting. As a sociological concept, this word can mean "moving people forcibly from their homelands into new and foreign lands" or even destroying them, like uprooting a plant, a tree. Not that they are two very different things; often they are similar, even identical in meaning. There is always an element of destruction in uprooting, especially if the plant is mature and productive, to keep with our metaphor of the tree. This destruction is complete where the plant is not re-rooted or replanted elsewhere, in a different soil and clime. It is important to take note of the adverb “forcibly” in the definition. In the case of human beings, this uprooting takes on a totally new and complex meaning since we are more than a mere biological life form: there is history and identity, sociality, culture and so on. Whatever else it may or may not be, uprooting is tragedy; it is pain, suffering, and trauma.

The accelerated, unplanned and unchecked urbanization of Quetta has not only put tremendous stress on the natural resources and public amenities of the valley, but, more importantly, it has also affected the old ways of doing, knowing and being. With this anarchic urbanization has come uprooting and fragmentation of communities and, since nature abhors vacuum, the arrival of a new global, mass culture of crass individualism. In the process, while some were uprooted and forced to leave, the uprooted from elsewhere have been pouring in. At the same time, the arrival of the over-arching forces of rupture in the form of modernization and its attendant, secularization, has meant the dissolution of real communities into floating agglomerations of atomized individuals and expediently defined artificial groups. Many of these people increasingly go online in search of meaning in the so-called “social networks” where all relations are mediated by gadgets, applications, software and hardware. Most of these cyber/online communities are sorry parodies of the real communities from which these "netizens" have been displaced, or which they have willingly abandoned in a new rat race to keep up with the “times”----the online zeitgeist. There is certain angst, an existential fear, among the extreme cases of these networked but otherwise shrunken, unmoored souls. It is an anxiety condition now commonly known as FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. To many of these de-centered, floating yahoos it never occurs that sometimes it is actually best to miss out on certain things in life!

One of the effects of these changes is that often real people---duty-conscious and responsible citizens, rooted social beings----become hustlers with imported ethos, the most elevated, meaning-giving translation of which is seen in the thoroughly conditioned activities of buying-selling and accumulation. This new hustling culture can be observed in action in the multi-storied shopping malls that are popping up in Quetta like wild, toxic mushrooms. These glitzy monstrosities of concrete, metal and glass are not only eye sores to anyone who still remembers and values the traditional aesthetics of the built landscape of the city----low-rise residential and commercial buildings that blended well with their natural surroundings and that did not block views of the snow-peaked, majestic mountains that surround Quetta valley----but more importantly, they are also the screaming symbols of a cheap, gaudy culture of cold human exchange and immoderate (materialistic) acquisition.


Once upon a time, there were only general stores and provision stores in Quetta. Community-centered, owned and run by hard working people, these small businesses, along with the street hawkers of fruits and vegetables----the rehri walla, including that mobile recycling center that worked through a rather sophisticated new-for-old and old-for-new bartering system, the aanday baanday walla!----not only served their neighborhoods by selling daily essentials, but also, through their small scale activities, maintained social trust and ecological balance throughout the whole process of exchange, from the initial producer to the final buyer and consumer of a product. Because the vendors themselves were part of their local communities, buying and selling were very personal and the relationships were long term, all of which meant that everyone involved in the transactions had to shoulder the burden of trust and responsibility. The entire process was infused with ethics, in short. People would buy on credit and it was normal for families to maintain credit ledgers with their local general/provision stores, vegetable vendors and bread sellers (tandoor walla or naan bayee). With these huge shopping malls and shopping plazas and their impersonal, profit-only modes of exchange, this whole organic system of human transaction and relationship is replaced, or rather, displaced and discarded. Modern malls are, after all, places where one often visits not so much to get the daily necessities of life as to have an “experience” of shopping, or just to “hang out” at. And most of what passes for necessities these days are manufactured needs, anyway. These false necessities---objects of greed rather than of real needs----are created through the 24/7 capitalist consumerist propaganda, called advertisements, on TV and the Internet. Like everything else we so readily and happily thank the cult of convenience for, this choice of what we really need and don't need, this crucial act of critical judgment or discrimination, is made for us by Google, Instagram and Facebook algorithms and Netflix/Hollywood nowadays. Modern shopping malls are by their very nature---because they are so heavily resource and energy dependent---wasteful and, therefore, anti-ecological. More importantly, they are destructive of perennial human virtues like thrift, contentment (ridha), humility and simplicity, all of which are the foundational virtues upon which stood the old Quettawali.

I think it was Jane Jacobs, the great chronicler of urban decay and revival and the legendary activist author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, who once viewed life in villages and small towns to be similar to living in a kind of social prison where everyone knows everyone else, where there are "taboos" and "myths", and because of which one has to observe decorum and even engage in self and social censorship of all kinds in order to belong responsibly to, and remain respectfully part of, one’s community. In big cities, where anonymity often means freedom, such rituals are considered redundant since everyone is like a stranger, a traveler, someone who is merely passing through. There is a certain charm and attraction in the latter, if only because it affords people freedom from the constraining taboos of small towns. But that freedom comes at a cost to both the individual and his/her community. The American sociologist Robert Putnam has brilliantly articulated some of these costs of community breakdown and social isolation in his books Bowling Alone, Better Together, Our Kids and The Upswing. The self, after all, becomes truly free when it is enmeshed with the “other” in all its complexity: “For one to be (truly) free there must be at least two” says Zygmunt Bauman, the incisive chronicler of "Modernity as Holocaust". It is also the first step in moving from self to Self, to use the language of Hindu metaphysics.

For example, what the modern mind often disparagingly calls “taboo” once had a positive social role and ethical function, both in the private and especially in the public realm. So did the many myths, which are also now seen negatively, something that is false, fictional and opposed to modern instrumental reason, or as the relic of “under-developed” savages or “primitive” cultures. Certainly not always an unmitigated blessing, taboos usually functioned as informal codes of law and order. As age-old established ideas and practices, they often regulated behavior effectively and kept transgressions from the norm at a minimum. In traditional societies whose members know better, a myth, as Ananda Coomaraswamy has so aptly said, “ …is the penultimate truth…myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.” In short, myths are higher truths that escape complete human articulation and expression through the usual human faculties like the Weberian bureaucratic rationality. But the irony is that modernity----and now its logical offspring, postmodernity---in its hasty and half-baked efforts to debunk and “deconstruct” traditional myths, has reinstated its own violent myths and ugly taboos, thus proving the truism that the opposite of one type of taboo and myth is not some absolutely objective anti-myth rationality---an omniscient, godly view from nowhere----but another type of taboo and myth! One is tempted to recall Shakespeare and claim that modern man "commits the oldest sins in the newest kind of ways." Says Frithjof Schuon: "Those who reproach our ancestors with having been stupidly credulous forget in the first place that one can also be stupidly incredulous, and in the second place that the self-styled destroyers of illusion live on illusions that exemplify a credulity second to none; for a simple credulity can be replaced by a complicated one, adorned with the arabesque of a studied doubt that forms part of the style, but it is still credulity: complication does not make error less false, nor stupidity less stupid." (Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006: 83)

In the end, there are only our deep metaphysical presuppositions or beliefs that we need to choose from. The point here is that the choice for us---and yes, it is a choice in a sense----is between submitting to something higher to us---the transcendent, the higher Reality, Truth, Haqq----and genuflecting to the man-made idols of this world. It is a choice, either to be Imago Dei or profane man, to be a pontifical being or a promethean one. (see On Belief)

To get back to the issues of uprooting and urbanization with which I started this piece, starting in the late 1970s, Quetta underwent some profound changes at all levels and in all domains, socio-political, economic and so on. The most visible of these, and the most important in my view, was the arrival of Afghan refugees from neighboring Afghanistan, as a result of the Afghan war waged by jihadi fanatics against the Soviets and their installed vassals in that country. The story of that devastating war---the Dollar Jihad, or Petrodollar Jihad, as it is known---has been well told by many others and I have also discussed it in some of my blogposts so I will not dwell too much on it here. In short, in the two or three decades after the war started in the late 1970s, Pakistan became a frontline state from where the brutal war was planned, sponsored or financed by the imperialist Americans and their neo-Wahhabi Saudi and Gulf clients. While that war completely destroyed Afghanistan----it is still destroying in one form or another---and as it turned many hustlers, crooks and criminals in the forked-tongued, Janus-faced Pakistani establishment into billionaires----both of the khaki/boots variety and otherwise---the delicate natural and cultural ecology of border towns like Quetta, and to some extent Peshawar, suffered irreparable damage.

The displaced people of the war-ravaged Afghanistan who poured into Quetta and surrounding areas in droves, often with different histories and sets of values, were psychologically damaged and badly traumatized. This would have implications for the local communities among whom they would eventually settle. Obviously, survival was top priority for the displaced. Their host country which, after having helped Western imperialists and hypocritical Gulf potentates destroy their country and their lives in the name of some misguided, if not outright stupid, geopolitical notion of “strategic depth” to be achieved with the aid of an expedient and instrumental understanding of “jihad”, neither had the capability nor the will to accommodate them in a decent and humane manner as is required by international norms and laws. That criminal apathy of the Pindi-Lahore ruling criminal mafia towards the displaced and the brutalized of Afghanistan was also because they were pouring into that internally colonized and plundered province of Balochistan and not into Islamabad or Lahore. Any large scale human catastrophe is also an opportunity for criminal elements to flourish. War is a racket, after all, and not just for those who start it, feed it, and who keep it going. And that is what happened during the Afghanistan war as well, a war that has yet to come to an end. Soon after the arrival of the refugees, the guns, drugs and other evils followed. For example, the AK-47 Kalashnikov sub-machine gun which was the weapon of choice for the dollar-funded jihadis fighting in Afghanistan and the lethally addictive drug heroin made from the poppy grown in that country became easily and cheaply available commodities in the bazaars of Quetta, just like matchboxes and onions or potatoes. Illicit capital swamped the local markets and, as a result, property prices soared exponentially.

But these were just some of the nuisances. The arrival of a pathologically literalist and violently politicized version of Islam---Petro Islamism from the Gulf---is another big factor that one cannot ignore in any honest and meaningful accounting of the changes that have taken place over the past few decades in Quetta in particular and in the country in general. These rigid, narrow, and imported modern-literalist interpretations----one might say the standard, globalized, post-modern model of religion that manifests itself in such places as India, Myanmar, USA, Nigeria, Sri Lanka----are open attacks on the local, rooted and integral understandings of the faith which are always infused with the traditional, spiritual or the esoteric dimension of faith. These pre-jihadi understandings and practices of the faith were not blinded by the extremely literalist and exclusivist interpretations that insist on seeing and understanding religion with one eye only and which are, historically speaking, recent phenomena anyway. They were mindful of the inner mysteries of the faith, the spirit, complexity and the hikma that have always been part and parcel of traditional Islam, of Sunnah and of Tasawwuf in particular, a wisdom reflected in such Hadith e Qudsi, where Allah says: “My mercy prevails over My wrath”. But given the atrocious power differentials in this kind of encounter of interpretations, the fickleness of the passionate or lower self, the dominance of greed, the lust for pelf and power, unrestrained worldliness, amoral Machiavellian political expediency, these integral and holistic local understandings of faith are being overwhelmed by the generic, imported interpretations and their crude, totalistic epistemologies. The political psychologist, Ashis Nandy, has a point when he says:

“…once you believe in a generic form of religion or faith, you are closer to more powerful but narrower forms of history, political culture, and even shared prejudices about how the experience of the past can be interpreted. Your prejudices and stereotypes are no longer small-scale or local. So what was previously the extremism of a particular sect of fundamentalists belonging to, say, Sunni Islam, now becomes the traits of Muslims and Islam in general. What was previously a perceived shortcoming or intolerance of a particular Western Indian peasant caste becomes a feature of Hindus as a whole. As you begin to use generic categories identified with Hindus and Muslims, you lose touch with specific communities. You are gradually pushed towards standardized forms of history…and the emphasis shifts to historical eras in which one faith oppressed, ruled over, or humiliated another.” (Ashis Nandy in Talking India, p.99).

Before the ugly rise of systematic ethno-sectarian bigotry and violence partly as a result of this reduction of faith to a crass political ideology, it was simply unthinkable to witness the pastoral, mountain dwelling Baloch and their somewhat urbanized cousins, the Brahvis, indulge in murderous orgies of the sort that happened in places such as Mastung and Khuzdar some years ago when Shia pilgrims travelling on buses----particularly Hazara Shias but also some non-Hazaras---- were separated from non-Shias and gunned down brutally in broad daylight. In old Quetta, there were no fire spitting, hatred spewing, opportunist charlatans named “Mengal” or “Barech”. Then, violent fanaticism in matters of faith were the last things to be the identity markers of these two native peoples of the province. These were people who had always had a spiritually sensitive, and, therefore, a more nuanced understanding of their faith. These were people who had hosted many Hindus, Sikhs and people of different sects and religious traditions for centuries amongst them, in their own communities. Many of them still do: witness the presence of some of the country's oldest Hindu communities in places like Dera Bugti and Sibi. These communities were pluralists or “multiculturalists” long, very long, before the overlords of humanity in the modern-secular West---and their brown and black satraps in the non-Western metropolises----started theorizing about it and preaching its virtues both within and outside the modern West!

The Dictator: The mustachioed Jhallandari EVIL!

Now, it is no secret that some of the members of these old communities of the province, the Baloch and the Brahvi, were propagandized and transformed---into strategic "assets"---- again mostly with the help of Gulf petro dollars, in order to neutralize and counter the more secular-leaning nationalist elements who have long struggled for their rights in what they see as the oppressive, predatory federation, the Pindi-Lahore cabal. After all, these fanatical and murderous “assets” of the Center, the powers-that-be that (mis)-rule from Islamabad/Rawalpindi, are cost effective and efficient when it comes to the deployment of the diabolical colonial ruse of distract-delude-divide-destroy-and-rule in the peripheries. Or, fittna, to use the vernacular. These ugly sectarian ideologies of blood and gore, these merciless death cults that have no relation to any of the authentically revealed religions, except for their ridiculous names and vacuous slogans, and that in fact borrow profusely from modern totalitarian and genocidal worldviews like Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and Fascism, were imported into the city and the province for that purpose from interior Punjab and also from neighboring Afghanistan where they were first incubated and actively nurtured and promoted, by the same actors, for the Dollar Jihad of the 1980s.

The tragic consequences of these exclusivist and highly ideologized/politicized understandings and the profane and utilitarian abuses of religion----what Chalmers Johnson in another context once called “blowback”----are there for all to see: suicide bombings, target killings, sectarian slayings, the spread of a pathological culture of bigotry and intolerance across the country. Those who have poisoned the well are now forced to drink from it, as an old saying reminds us. All of these toxic developments have turned Quetta into a war zone with military and paramilitary check-posts and armored cars everywhere in the city. A big chunk of its population is permanently traumatized and many of them carry deep psychological scars within, the inner injuries that will take years if not decades to heal.

The future: In these four pieces on Quettawali, I have tried to identify some features of the way of life in old Quetta. I talked about the notions of identity, community and also some of the values (iqdaar) that I believe one can identify as essential ingredients of that code of life. In these posts and in some of my other blogposts I have argued that Quetta has now become a very different place. The changes are mostly destructive of the natural and social-cultural ecologies of the place and what has not changed has become corrupted from within even if the appearance or the form remains. The readers may find my assessment of these changes mostly negative. If that is the case, they are correct, and I am not going to apologize for any of it. That lament is exactly what these articles are trying to convey. For example, in Quetta of today, the new definitions and boundaries of the self and the other (identity), apart from or because of being totally instrumental and one dimensional, are built not on the earlier awareness and appreciation of similarities and distinctions, but on their ruins. There is a discernible air of strangeness, of disconnect, of anomie and apathy, and a growing culture of hustling everywhere one goes: “What’s in it for me?”, a culture of nafsa nafsi, as they say locally. The cult of quantity, or commodity fetishism, is fast replacing the old ethos of quality and symbolism. Perhaps Quetta will become another soulless metropolis with lonely people living together. Perhaps the new and future residents of Quetta will shape the city and everything in it in their own image and with the passage of time the old Quettawali will be no more, or it will be looked upon as something quaint at best and absurd at worst. To quote the critic Theodore Dalrymple, they, the future residents of the old Shalkot, would then giggle helplessly at the absurdity and say: “Such naiveté is not for us in our enlightened state, however, and we prove our sophistication by finding it ridiculous!”

What is Quettawali? (Part 3: Identity)

 What is Quettawali ? Part 3: Identity

( Part 1, Part 2 )

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”                                                            Michel de Montaigne

“Only religion allows people to be magnificent without egotism.”

                                                                 Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad
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In this part 3 of my ruminations on Quettawali, I want to take up the issue of identity which I think is of critical importance if we want to understand how things have changed, or devolved, over the years in Quetta. To recap, we have already seen the importance of community and what happens when communities break down and anomie and alienation take over. Communal breakdown is a universal phenomenon, a malaise of late modernity that afflicts societies the world over. Sociologists have for long grappled with this issue, from Durkheim, Marx (when he was in his sociologist mode), Weber, Veblen, C. Wright Mills, to Anthony Giddens, Christopher Lasch and Zygmunt Bauman, to name some of the well-known figures in the discipline. One of the more recent books on this societal malaise is the brilliant socio-cultural survey of America by the sociologist Robert D. Putnam, a book aptly titled as Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Communities. Communities are, of course, made up of individuals who hold on to notions of the self and the other, or have identities, that define the collectives they form. The communities will be healthy and effective to the extent that the identities of the individuals are healthy and whole.

In the community where we grew up, the elders were elders first and then anything else. Children respected---and often feared---those elders as children first than as anything or anybody else. Age, belonging, a strong sense of community and familiarity transcended all ethnic, linguistic, religious and sectarian appellations. My father, a Quettawaal Hazara, never tires of telling me stories about the days when a Pashtun or a Punjabi elder, who knew my grandfather and the family (everybody knew everybody else in those days!), would reprimand him in public because he had been caught red-handed, say, loitering at the cinemas (called bi-scope in those days) during school hours. The elder from the other community would often grab him, or one of his equally mischievous friends, by the ear and would only let go when he was finally at the door of the house lecturing my father in front of his parents who, in turn, would quickly join the elder in those acts of rebuke. The same would happen the other way round. In addition to their many immediate ethno-linguistic and religio-sectarian identities, the Awans of Tel Gudam, the Fateh Khans of Nichari, the Marri Balochis and the Kasis of Khudaidad Road and the nearby mohallas (from Lodi Maidan, to Nichari and all the way up to the foot of Koh e Murdar) were also all part of the same bigger, inclusive community of Quetta where we all lived. Many of their mischievous youth used to receive similar rebukes from my elders. That is how things were then.

There was mutual respect, there was trust and communal belonging, fraternity, sharing and caring, all of which were informed by the traditional understandings of the self and the other. In that worldview, the “I” was not indiscriminately exclusive---like it often is nowadays where it is defined by artificial ideological constructions--- just as the “other” was not completely a stranger, or a dreaded and feared alien. Then, the identities were multi-layered and complex even if there were no sociologists to theorize them as such and then publish papers and books on them. People were many things at the same time, and equally true to each level of their identities. People did not understand themselves in utterly negative terms, in the sense of “I am what I am because I am not what you are” or “I am what I am because I am not you”. Identity was not "aridly singular" but was "a nested series which spiraled out" as Shiv Visvanathan has said. The self was not rigidly understood and the other was not vilified and violently demonized as a threat, as the totally other that must be sidelined, even destroyed. In other words, there was an ethic of accommodation and a generosity of spirit, all religiously informed. Entertaining difference was part of the ethos of all communities. The Quettawali ethos knew how to entertain the “otherness” of the other, while at the same time cherish similarities.

The Great Chain of Being: hierarchy within and without

There was a certain kind of fluidity, or open-endedness to identities, not of the amoral post-modern type (“anything goes!”), but one imbued with traditional virtues of empathy, concern for truth, goodness and beauty, for love and caring. Difference and separateness were there, for sure, but the frontiers that defined them were comfortably porous. What was said and done always had an other-worldly dimension to it and was not exhausted by the dictates of instrumental cost-benefit reasoning that is the hallmark of the modern “entrepreneurial” mindset which starts and ends with “What’s in it for me (or for my group)?”. Modernity and its materialist-worldly cult of hustling, after all, is nothing if not a narrowing of the horizons of consciousness. It is a shrinking of the horizon of thought and the coarsening of the faculty of feeling, “a way of drowning into nothingness” as a sage has said. "Hell is other people!" says one character in a famous work No Exit by the quintessentially modern existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. While its proponents make so much noise about human rights and human equality, its actual nineteenth and twentieth century record is abysmal on many fronts. From racist colonialism, ethnocidal nationalisms to ecocidal capitalist imperialism, everywhere we look the “other” of the dominant modern-western-white “self” is the enemy that must be controlled, dominated, opposed, marginalized, ghettoized and annihilated.

One could even say that, in the olden days in Quetta, there was a certain charm in the way people understood themselves and others. Or, it was an “authentic innocence”: an innocent charm, yet full of wisdom. It was what we see in an innocent child where the duality of self and the other has not yet manifested itself, not because of the child’s immaturity but because of the child’s pure consciousness which has yet to be sullied by the ways of the world. It is the same consciousness that becomes whole and united again at the other end of life’s spectrum, in spiritual union, when one becomes old and gets ready for departure to where one has come from, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr has so beautifully explained in one of his important writings on the self and other. The time I am recalling was a time when not everything had become secularized and profane yet. There was symbolism and an understanding of the qualitative aspects of things in addition to their quantitative sides. Above all, the sense of the sacred in everything, of something bigger than our trivial selves, still pervaded the cultural landscape of the city. There was more authentic religion, both understood and especially practiced and lived, and less pretentious, toxic religiosity. The values have been reversed now; an inversion has taken place.

Based on such notions of identity and community, Quetta was a sane society then. One’s identity was not merely an extension of one’s ego yearning for worldly gains, an ego ceaselessly engaged in the cost benefit analysis of the crassest type, but it was a notion of self that was embedded within a system of concentric circles each of which was a rich layer of identity. There was an awareness and respect for the perennial Golden Rules such as, what we do to others we cannot but invite the same upon ourselves; or, what we do to our own, we cannot but invite others to do the same to us; and, do unto others what you want done to you by others. These were all the constituent principles of the code of life shared by all the communities of old Quetta, something which I have been calling Quattawali in these articles.

In this age of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and especially TikTok (the newest and the deepest of the chambers of cyber/digital hell!) things have radically changed. People now still have fluid and complicated identities, but of a totally different type. These identities that many wear like masks and badges nowadays are the readily available avatars on the Internet. These are the plug and play, the use and discard type of identities available for download and upload on the innumerable digital platforms. In the wake of collapse of real communities of real people, and in the absence of nuanced and historically informed notions of identity, these one dimensional, disoriented, atomized individuals who populate the cyber “communities” and social media networks with their ever changing disposable identity labels, are like floating weeds. They can be easily pushed and pulled in any direction by the manipulative entrepreneurs, the psychopathic merchants of the new attention economy, and the captains of the “perception management” industries. These zero-empathy, psychopathic gurus of the capitalist corporate world are people who subtly and invisibly “govern us, control and mold our minds, form our tastes and suggest our ideas” without our knowledge as the father of modern propaganda, Edward Barnays, wrote a century ago.

In short, in old Quetta, people were often contented and secure in their skins. Time moved slowly and humanely without making everybody its prisoner; thought and speech had quality and gravity, and when there was no speech, the silences were rich, meaningful and pregnant with the sublime; the old zeitgeist valued self-effacement and humility, not vulgar exhibitionism and toxic narcissism; feelings were profound yet subdued and often sincere; relationships had depth, were cultivated and rooted in communal soil and nurtured carefully with age-old virtues. One’s identity and self-respect were not dependent on the demonization of the other as “kaffir” or “traitor”, or on the number of “likes” or “followers” on the anti-social digital wastelands euphemistically called "social media", but on the ineffable, on perennial iqdaar (values), some of which I have listed in these articles on Quettawali.

Continued... (see Part 4)